The Now Moment
I am not one of those people who love to shop around. When I want something, I want it, and I want it NOW.
I had been thinking for several months about getting a bird spotting scope and a point and shoot camera to do some digiscoping. So when a Red-bellied woodpecker crawled around on a tree not 30 feet from me one day as I was wandering along a stream bed, I got a sudden hankering to bite the bullet and get the digiscope gear.
So first thing, I called my brother to ask what kind of spotting scope I should get if I want to get into digiscoping. My brother has been a bird photographer for a long time and knows about things like computers, cameras, scopes, GPS units, whatever. Why waste time looking online, reading stuff I won’t understand when a sibling is a phone call away, let alone just 2 miles down the road?
“You should really go online and check what’s out there,” he said.
I wasn’t happy about that because I had a bad case of the ‘nows’ and if I could just be advised of what to get now, then I could go get it now, and come back in a week to try and get a shot of that woodpecker before it grew old and died.
“Well, should I get a 65mm or an 80mm?” I asked into my cell phone. (No, I don’t normally chat on cell phones while in the woods. Please don’t think I do. I use it as a watch and it happened to be handy.)
“It depends what you like.”
How did I know what I like? He’s supposed to tell me. I groaned because it was now most likely to be yet another few months before I would figure out what I wanted and trust myself to make a good decision.
However, believe it or not, when I went online to research I really got into reading up on scopes and checking birding blogs to see what people use and what kind of shots they can get.
About a month after that woodpecker had given me that peck in the pants, my Swarovski 80mm ATS HD spotting scope arrived at my doorstep from Eagle Optics. A yippee moment for sure.
If you want to read more about my digiscope equipment please click on My Digiscope Set Up page. If not, you can enjoy the puzzle of the week coming up next.
